Friday, 23 January 2015

After spending years saying that there was no cost of living
crisis, last week David Cameron said that Britain deserves a pay rise - a huge
admission of failure. The recovery may have reached the City of London, but it
hasn't reached the kitchen tables of working people around the country. We are
now approaching the end of the first Parliament since the 1920s in which people
will be worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.

So here are some facts about pay under David Cameron:

Since the
last election average wages have fallen by £1,600 a year with the number
getting less than the Living Wage rising from 3.4 million to 4.9 million.

Last year
company directors' rewards increased by 21%. A director in a FTSE 100
company now earns on average 130 times more than their average employee –
and 300 times more than the Living Wage.

The
Government has cut taxes for people earning £150,000 a year even while
salaries at the top have been soaring away and ordinary workers’ wages
have fallen. And if the Tories win the election, they want to cut taxes
for millionaires even further.

The next Labour Government will raise the National Minimum
Wage so that it gets closer to average earnings every year – rising to more
than £8 before 2020.

But it is not just the legal minimum that matters. Labour
believes government can do more to work with employers to pay the Living Wage.
And firms that can afford to pay multi-million pound salaries at the top need
to explain why they will not pay the Living Wage to those at the bottom.

Some 30 Labour local authorities are now paying the Living
Wage to their staff.

The next Labour Government will do more to encourage the
Living Wage at the bottom and shed light on the pay packages given to some at
the top.

We will:

Introduce
Make Work Pay contracts, with a tax rebate for employers that sign up to
become Living Wage employers in the first year of the next Parliament.

Ensure that
central government learns the lessons from local government in where firms
seeking public sector contracts are required to pay the Living Wage.

Require
companies to publish the ratio of the pay of their top earner compared to
the average employee and the pay packages of the 10 highest paid employees
outside the boardroom.

Put an
employee representative on remuneration committees, ensuring the views of
ordinary staff are heard when decisions to award top pay packages are
made.

Tackling low pay and encouraging the Living Wage is one of
the ways the next Labour Government can ensure everyone’s hard work is rewarded
and we build real and enduring prosperity.

Monday, 12 January 2015

Labour Party: The Tories are launching their election campaign today - and the NHS isn't part of it.

Last week's A and E figures exposed the worst week the NHS has experienced in living memory, with record numbers waiting over four hours to be seen, and hospitals around the country declaring "major incident" status. With the NHS so important to everyone in this country, and the Tory NHS crisis worsening day after day, it's a staggering omission by David Cameron to fail to make the NHS one of his six election themes.

On the deficit David Cameron has broken his promise to balance the books because he has failed to deliver rising living standards for all. Working people are worse off under the Tories and that's why the tax revenues needed to get the deficit down have fallen short.

The Tories have abandoned the centre-ground with an extreme plan for even deeper spending cuts which would take public spending back to a share of national income last seen in the 1930s, when there was no NHS and children left school at 14.

Labour will cut the deficit every year and get the current budget into surplus and national debt falling as soon as possible in the next Parliament.

Our tough but balanced plan is different from the Tories' extreme and ideological approach. Alongside sensible spending cuts we will reverse David Cameron's tax cut for millionaires and tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

And we'll raise £2.5 billion for a Time to Care Fund for the NHS, funded by a mansion tax on homes worth over £2 million, by clamping down on tax avoidance schemes and by a new levy on tobacco companies.

That's the only way to balance the books in a fair way while protecting our NHS.

The Labour Party

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